Families are central to women’s lives, and in Chapter 2, Lynn Abrams suggests that family practices offer a way of thinking about women in the past that allows for women’s own representation of their familial roles and identity. Families and their relationships are constantly in flux and have always meant different things and performed different functions for women at various stages of their lives. Abrams breaks the link between the family, the private sphere and women’s role by demonstrating how the family has always been part of the social, embedded in the local economy and its cultural patterns. Cultural perceptions of sexuality shaped the ways women were constructed as sexual beings. Anna Clark shows that whether female sexual desire was regarded as passive or voracious, authorities always saw it as dangerous. Women have had to grapple with contradictory and negative social constructions of female desire in their own experiences. As historians try to understand female sexual experiences, debating the fluidity of identity and the competing pulls of pleasure and danger, she argues that sexuality still remains in a mysterious and alluring twilight, only half understood. Cultural constructions and enduring stereotypes shape views of upbringing and education. Rebecca Rogers shows how understanding the interaction between a society’s vision of woman and the ways education enforces, modifies and challenges that vision to produce ‘good girls and women’ always carried a political dimension. Access to education and knowledge does indeed translate into forms of power, but the conditions of this access remain gendered, so that women’s power operates in different realms, hierarchically inferior to those of men’s.
Hierarchies of skill and status construct the gendered worker. In Chapter 5, I argue that ideas about who was or was not a worker affected whether women could work, what kind of work was truly accessible to them and why and where they were hired. Women were perceived as having a cluster of skills and characteristics that suited them for particular kinds of work, so their work was often defined in terms of male skill and expertise, or related to ‘men in charge’. But they could be strategic and entrepreneurial, choosing within the options open to them when and where they would work and what they were prepared to do. Indeed, women have always been social actors, and Pat Starkey argues that they have also shown themselves to be resourceful and enterprising in using - and occasionally subverting - religious structures in order to further their ambitions for faith-inspired service or personal development. In Chapter 6, exploring the three main religious traditions to influence European women over the past three centuries, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Starkey argues that women have experienced succour and support as well as denial and restriction within the religious communities into which they were born or, less often, those they had chosen. The ways that women use and rewrite the political structures are central to Karen Hunt’s discussion in Chapter 7. She argues that collectively and individually women have had and continue to have an ambivalent relationship to formal politics, while perpetuation of a sexual division of politics has justified the marginalisation of most women from the exercise of real power. Yet at the level of informal politics and within civil society women have a much longer history of participation. By expanding the boundaries of politics they created a more inclusive space to change the polity and to act out citizenship. Challenging liminalities, women showed that they could be as enthralled with war as men, that they took up military activities for a range of reasons and that they could be as aggressive and violent as men. Jane Potter, in Chapter 8, also identifies society’s enduring unease with women in the military and going to war. She challenges the notion of ‘peace-loving ladies’, but, as she illustrates, women were also integral to the peace movement, and in some ways led it, but within the movement, enduring gender constructions shaped the ways the movements operated.
Throughout the book, the authors have looked at the ways spaces were defined, and redefined, noting the complexities and shifting character of women’s worlds. Thus, Tammy M. Proctor argues that women always had a complicated relationship to leisure, because they frequently engaged in facilitating the leisure of others. In Chapter 9 she looks at how women’s claims to and opportunities for leisure changed and how they sought out additional spaces and times for participation in the cultural milieu. She argues that a woman’s empire is no longer limited to her home, but her ability to experience life outside the home is still shaped by factors within it. The same could be said about women’s interaction with ‘high culture’. Sian Reynolds raises the paradox of marginalising women as creators, practitioners and even as consumers, despite their role as audience, while defining painting, reading and music as appropriate to their education. Recognising the elite character of many of the arts, the gendered contexts in which they operated and the limitations on women, she takes the practical approach of trying to fill in the gaps in a history that has, for a long time, neglected to analyse the gender of the arts. This means re-examining the canon to see how women were placed within the cultural field of their time, as performers, creators or consumers of the arts, and how they negotiated cultural spaces.
World History
